HAVE GERMAN WILL TRAVEL FESTSPIEL

"Bei uns ist immer was los!"

Bayreuther Festspiele / Bayreuth Festival (annual month-long summer music festival held in Bavarian town of Bayreuth from end of July to end of August)

After Cosima's retirement in 1906, took over management of the festival, introducing new staging and performance styles. His early death in 1930 left the Festival in the hands of his English­ born wife Winifred Wagner, with Heinz Tietjen as artistic director.

Bayreuth under Nazi Germany

In the 1920s, well before the rise of the Nazi Party, Winifred Wagner became a strong supporter and close personal friend of Adolf Hitler; her correspondence with Hitler has never been released by the Wagner family. She and other festival leaders were members of Nazi chief ideologue Alfred Rosenberg's Kampfbund fur deutsche Kultur, which actively suppressed modernist music and works by "degenerate" artists. The festival maintained some artistic independence under the Third Reich. Ironically, Hitler attended performances that included Jewish and foreign singers, long after they had been banned from all other venues across Germany (including heldentenor Max Lorenz, married to a well-known Jewish woman). ·winifred's influence with Hitler was so strong that Hitler even wrote a letter (at her behest) to anti-fascist Italian conductor , begging him to lead the festival. Toscanini refused. From 1933 to 1942, the festival was conducted principally by Karl Elmendorff.

It was under the Third Reich that the festival made its first break from tradition, abandoning the deteriorating 19th century sets created by Richard Wagner. Many protested at the changes, including prominent conductors such as Toscanini and , and even some members of the Wagner family. In their view, any change to the festival was a profanation against "the Master" (Wagner). Nevertheless, Hitler approved of the changes, thus paving the way for more innovations in the decades to come.

During the war, the festival was turned over to the Nazi Party, which continued to sponsor for wounded soldiers returning from the front. These soldiers were forced to attend lectures on Wagner before the performances, and most found the festival to be tedious. [4J However, as "guests of the Fuhrer", none complained.

Bayreuth Memorial

During the 1970s Winifred Wagner was repeatedly petitioned to install a memorial to the Jewish singers at the who had been murdered in concentration camps. [51 A plaque was finally installed honouring Ottilie Metzger-Lattermann and Henriette Gottlieb after Winifred' s death.

Memorial to Jewish singers in the Bayreuth Festival Park